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Hyun Bang Shin
Asian urbanism Book section
Original citation: Shin, Hyun Bang (2019) Asian urbanism. In: Orum, Anthony M., (ed.) The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedias in Social Sciences. Wiley. ISBN 9781118568453 (In Press)
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Headword/Title: Asian Urbanism
ID Number: EURS0010
Author Name: Hyun Bang Shin (please note that ‘Shin’ is my family name, and ‘Hyun
Bang’ is my first name; Title: Professor)
Institution:
E mail address: [email protected]
Word Count: 5,790 words
Abstract: This chapter on Asian urbanism begins by examining how Asian urbanism can be
seen as both actually existing and imagined, taking into consideration the ways in which
Asian urbanism has entailed the use of successful Asian cities as reference points for other
cities in the Global South on the one hand, and how such referencing practices often entail the
rendering of Asian urbanism as imagined models and ideologies that are detached from the
realities of the receiving end of the model transfer on the other. The ensuing section examines
how Asian urbanism can be situated in the context of state-society relations, with a particular
emphasis on the role of the Asian states that exhibited developmental and/or authoritarian
orientations in the late twentieth century. The penultimate section explores the socio-spatiality
of Asian urbanism, summarising some salient characteristics of Asian urbanism. The final
section concludes with an emphasis on the need of avoiding Asian exceptionalism, and also of
having a pluralistic perspective on Asian urbanism.
Keywords:
urban geography; urbanization; globalization; critical theory; Asia; urban Asia; Global South;
urban studies
For citation:
Shin, H.B. (2019) Asian urbanism. In: Orum, A.M. (ed.) The Wiley-Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Wiley-Blackwell
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Asian Urbanism
Introduction
Ever since the Chicago School of urban sociology has considered Chicago as an empirical site
of analysing the ‘urbanism as a way of life’ (Wirth, 1938), scholarly debates on the
production of the urban and urbanism have been largely based on the experiences of a narrow
set of paradigmatic cities from the Western advanced economies, which are positioned at the
apex of global competition and network of cities (Friedmann, 1986). As Goldman asserts
(2011, p.556), the attention to a handful number of global cities has made us blind to those
‘significant social dynamics occurring within and among lower-tiered ‘other’ cities’, or in
other words, those activities ‘working below the radar of the global-cities analytics’. Cities
from the majority world in particular are often dropped ‘off the map’, either excluded from
scholarly attention or treated as an exception to the norm (Robinson, 2005).
As scholars increasingly attach importance to shedding light on divergent trajectories of
urbanisation across the globe, the experiences of non-Western cities from Asia, Africa, Latin
America and the Middle East have begun to gain attention, explored for generating
knowledge and de-centring urban theories. For practical reasons, among political and
economic elites in particular, Asian cities such as Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Seoul
emerge as an alternative source of developmental aspiration for non-Western cities (and at
times, for cities in the advanced economies as well), for they provide the potential to function
as a less conventional reference point for urban and economic development. Indeed, ‘Asian
cities are increasingly imagined as global frontiers of urban studies in the twenty-first century'
(Bunnell, 2017, p.9).
This chapter on Asian urbanism begins by examining how Asian urbanism can be seen as
both actually existing and imagined, taking into consideration the ways in which Asian
urbanism has entailed the use of successful Asian cities as reference points for other cities in
the Global South on the one hand, and how such referencing practices often entail the
rendering of Asian urbanism as imagined models and ideologies that are detached from the
realities of the receiving end of the model transfer on the other. The ensuing section examines
how Asian urbanism can be situated in the context of state-society relations, with a particular
emphasis on the role of the Asian states that exhibited developmental and/or authoritarian
orientations in the late twentieth century. The penultimate section explores the socio-spatiality
of Asian urbanism, summarising some salient characteristics of Asian urbanism. The final
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section concludes with an emphasis on the need of avoiding Asian exceptionalism, and also of
having a pluralistic perspective on Asian urbanism.
Asian Urbanism, actually existing and imagined
It has increasingly become a global practice to use paradigmatic city models as a way to
inform urban development (Robinson, 2005), a practice that is akin to ‘fast policy transfer’
argued by Peck and Theodore (2001; see also Peck and Theodore, 2010). Paradigmatic city
models such as Barcelona (González, 2011) have been circulated widely as an established
model for export, pursued ‘as a fast track’ for cities to reach a ‘world class status’ (Meagher,
2013, p.396). More recently, Asian cities in particular have seen the elevation of their status,
becoming active agents of ‘worlding’ that refers to ‘practices of citation, allusion, comparison
and competition’ between themselves (Roy and Ong, 2011, p.17). Asian cities constitute
newly established non-conventional paradigmatic cities in their own right to inform and
transplant their urban development experiences to the Global South, and more recently, to the
Global North as well.
Asian urbanism is often associated with the success stories of so-called Asian ‘tiger
economies’ including South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, all of which have
experienced condensed economic development and accompanying urbanisation. Dunford and
Yeung’s (2011) study provides an illuminating insight into the degree of condensation of
developmental experiences of these leading Asian economies including mainland China.
Their study estimated the number of years each economy required to undergo a five-fold
increase of their real GDP per capita at the point of economic take-off. While advanced
economies such as the UK and Germany took more than 160 and 108 years respectively,
Asian tiger economies such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, having seen 1966, 1958
and 1960 as the reference years for economic take-off, took about 22, 24 and 26 years
respectively. In other words, it required less than one generation (30 years) of their national
population to experience such economic development in Asia, while their counter-parts in the
West required more than a century. China also took about 25 years since their economic take-
off in 1978 to achieve a five-fold increase of their real GDP per capita. During this period,
China’s urbanisation rate according to the World Bank data increased from 17.9% in 1978 to
38.4% in 2002, while the latest figure for 2016 reads 56.8%. South Korea’s urbanisation rate
surged from 33.3% in 1966 to 70.4% in 1988, becoming a predominantly urban society.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the Asian experiences of economic success were
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accompanied by condensed urbanisation, and such success stories add weight to the rise of
Asian urbanism as a reference point for emulation and transplantation. To this extent, Asian
urbanism can be considered as actually existing.
To help export the urban development experiences of leading Asian economies, an active
institutional network of domestic and overseas companies as well as governmental players
(e.g., state-owned enterprises, government-linked companies) nowadays works closely to put
the aspirational Asian urbanism into actionable plans. Satellite cities, industrial parks or other
zones of exception (e.g., special economic zones, free trade zones or free economic zones),
often located on urban peripheries where land assembly is relatively less constrained, become
the sites of accommodating new urban imaginations and modernist fantasies (Bach, 2011),
serving affluent populations who have resources to afford the new infrastructure and housing.
For instance, Watson (2014, p.221) cites Tanzania’s proposal to develop Kigamboni City in
Dar es Salaam as an eco-city with the support from ‘the current Minister of Lands, Housing
and Human Settlements, Anna Tabaijuka (previous head of UN-Habitat and remembered for
her promotion of inclusive cities)’. The proposal was to involve Mi World from Dubai-United
Arabs Emirate and China Hope Limited, while master plans were produced by LH
Consortium, a public corporation from South Korea with decades-long experiences in
producing new towns in their country of origin.
Circulation of Asian urbanism entails the circulation of capital and expertise. Percival and
Waley (2012) examine an initiative that involves Korean and Indonesian firms to produce
middle and upper class enclaves through new town construction in Cambodia, an initiative
they refer to as the manifestation of ‘intra-Asian urbanism’. The project relies heavily on the
contributions by the consortium of Korean development, financial, and engineering firms who
have sought profiteering opportunities by making use of their capital, expertise and business
network (see also Nam, 2017). Percival and Waley (2012, p.2874) argue that the development
of new satellite cities in Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam ‘are
mainly funded by intra-Asian foreign direct investment’, and that the rise of Korean
investments in Cambodian real estate markets increased in the early 2000s when Korea’s own
real estate market was in recession. The latter suggests the possibility of South Korea’s
surplus capital having channelled into Cambodia in the form of foreign direct investment. A
similar situation was experienced in the export of Singaporean urban model in the late 1990s,
when Singapore saw the saturation of urban infrastructural development, which then led the
city-state’s 'urban planning agencies and developers…to look elsewhere beyond the territorial
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confines of the country for the realization of new urban development opportunities' (Pow,
2014, p.291). Vanessa Watson’s discussion of the rise of ‘African urban fantasies’ also comes
with the speculation that such attention to developing Africa’s cities and infrastructure has
been escalated, ‘as urban land and development move to saturation in Asia and the East’
(Watson, 2014, p.215). China’s increasing presence in urban and infrastructure development
in Africa and Latin America may also be partly explained by the abundance of surplus capital
generated by its economic success (c.f. Power, 2012).
While Asian cities act as reference points and an increasing number of experts and companies
with Asian origin partake in producing new urbanism elsewhere, it may also be argued that
Asian urbanism exists only as imaginaries and ideologies. Referring to the work of González
(2011) on Barcelona, Pow (2014, p.299) states that ‘urban models acquire a myriad of
different versions as they shift and mutate in specific urban context and are mobilized by
different actors’. Creating the same conditions of development and replicating the
developmental trajectory of a city would be a fallacy (Chua, 2011). Aihwa Ong (2011, p.15)
indeed contends that ‘[a]fter all, an urban model exported by Singapore has to be inserted into
a different set of material and political conditions elsewhere’, inevitably going through
mutations as they cross borders and move across geographies. Inter-referencing Asian models
of Singapore or Shanghai already perceived to have succeeded may help urban political and
economic elites to boost ‘the possibility of success, and therefore soften political and social
opposition’ when they try to mimic the success of such models (Shatkin, 2011, p.93). In this
regard, Asian urbanism may remain as abstracted development models, aspirational
imaginaries and ideologies, sometimes with little room to materialise and only existing on
policy documents and masterplans (c.f., Watson, 2014).
Situating Urbanism in State Society Relations
The condensed industrialisation and urbanisation especially in East Asia were facilitated by
the national state that exhibited authoritarian and developmental characteristics especially in
the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, such urban processes have been
analysed from the perspective of ‘developmental urbanism’ (Doucette and Park, 2018; Shin
and Kim, 2016) as a key characteristic of Asian urbanism, emphasising the influence of the
developmental state (and its multi scalar engagement with national and transnational interests)
on the making of urbanism. For decades, Asian states had been committing to the economic
development while maintaining authoritarian, non-democratic governance systems to quell
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opposition voices that would hinder economic pursuit. Pow (2014, p.300) suggests that such
an authoritarian nature of urban governance accompanying the success of urban development
among leading Asian economies is what makes the Asian models sought after by the urban
elites of the Global South. In other words, Asian urbanism as an ideology speaks to the needs
of the urban elites on the receiving end. For example, China’s preference for the import of the
Singapore model over Hong Kong’s laissez-faire development model may stem from
Singapore’s eschewing of the Western liberal democracy and China’s advocacy of a single-
party rule (see Zhang, 2012). Under these circumstances, the urban become ‘an important site
in which national developmental politics renders itself visible, in which the national state
attempts to render populations legible and governable’, as well as being ‘a site where ruling
powers try to legitimize their power but also accommodate some of the criticisms against it’
(Doucette and Park, 2018, p.401).
While the experiences of Asian tigers and China often get reflected in a version of Asian
urbanism that builds upon relatively strong presence of the state, although the state is
embedded in state-society relations rather than remaining as an isolated entity, critics such as
Hogan et al. (2012, p.43) observing urbanisation in Southeast Asia may highlight the
prevalence of ‘privatism’, suggesting that ‘most city-building by the rich and poor alike is
privately funded and reflects private aims and values’. One of the documented examples may
be that of the Philippines (Shatkin, 2008), where the strong influence of large landlords and
private developers have pursued mega-scale urban development projects and influenced
government planning processes to implement such projects, resulting in the ‘privatisation of
planning’.
From the late twentieth century, the onset of decentralisation and neoliberal globalisation has
shifted the roles of the state, its relationship with the society and the economy, and what this
means for Asian cities. No longer perceived as instruments of the developmental state, cities
were regarded initially as agents of regional economies’ integration with the global economy,
and in return, agents of transnational capital (see Douglass, 1988; Rimmer and Dick, 2009).
Nevertheless, the sticky nature of the developmental statism continues to play a role in the
making of ‘post-developmental’ urbanism (Park, Hill and Saito, 2012), and there is a
continuing challenge for scholars to understand the uneven geographies of urbanism that
responds to multi scalar processes of city-making. More recently, there is an emergent
emphasis on the importance of locating Asian urbanism in the geopolitical economic contexts
as a means to overcome methodological nationalism (e.g., Hsu, Gimm and Glassman, 2018;
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see also Hwang, 2016). For others reflecting upon the post-colonial turn of urban studies,
Asian cities are increasingly perceived as ‘worlding’ sites of experimentation and contestation
of the global urban hegemony through inter-referencing among themselves (Roy and Ong,
2011; see also Bunnell and Das, 2010).
In light of the heavy presence of authoritarian regimes noted as a key characteristic of Asian
urbanism, it would also be crucial to ascertain that the governing strategies of the state
oscillates between violent oppression and persuasion, responding to the growing pressure
from grassroots contestations and wider social movements (Doshi, 2013; Shin, 2018). In the
case of persuasion and co-optation, the accumulation of property assets by individuals
provides a material basis for garnering the popular support for the authoritarian state, thus
enabling a degree of political stability. Such stability is particularly significant in Asia, where
the state has been noted for having nurtured the middle classes as main supporters of the
authoritarian regimes in return for guaranteeing access to the fruits of economic development
and material affluence (see Ley and Teo, 2011; Lett, 1998; Tomba, 2004).
It is also vital to acknowledge the contradictory nature of Asian urbanism that responds to the
societal pressure. This means that there is a discrepancy between what Asian urbanism as an
ideology presents to an ideal world and what Asian urbanism exhibits as reality. For instance,
while an Asian model of development might be presented as being orderly and planned, an
actually existing Asian urbanism would encompass the co-existence of order and disorder,
engaging each other in a dialectic way. This would involve extensive contributions made by
ordinary people to produce their own cities through formal and informal means (see Korff,
1996; Simone, 2014). Furthermore, the urbanisation experiences in Asia exhibit an abundance
of people-led initiatives that testify to their will to survive adverse environments. Solomon
Benjamin’s (2008) ‘occupancy urbanism’ in India attests to one such initiative at grass-roots
level. In fact, each Asian city would possess a long history of contestation and struggles over
whose city they help produce (see Shin, 2018).
Socio spatiality of Asian Urbanism
Asian economies have been known to invest substantially in the built environment,
accumulating immobile assets to attract mobile transnational capital as their economies were
inserted in the circuits of global capitalism (Shin, 2007). While the growing importance of
property development as a main pillar of economic policy-making has been a key
characteristic of the post-industrial cities of the West (Scott, 2011; Fainstein, 2001), it is in
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Asia that has seen the heavy presence of property-led development to be central to national
industrialisation and urbanisation. Land-based accumulation in particular has turned out to be
prominent in economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong and China where state ownership of
land prevails (Haila, 2016; Hsing, 2010).
The rising affluence of Asian economies, especially that of the middle and upper classes of
Asia, produces spaces of exclusion and segregation as manifestations of increasing socio-
economic inequalities. This space of exclusionary enclave urbanism may take the form of
gated communities emerging in urban peripheries (e.g., Douglass and Huang, 2007; Pow,
2007) or ‘new town’ construction only affordable by the affluent class, as is the case of
Songdo City in South Korea (Shin, 2017) or Camko City in Cambodia (Percival and Waley,
2012). It is also to be noted here that such spaces of exclusion may also present the rise of a
new form of urbanity that reflects the changing socio-spatial relations in a given economy.
For example, gated communities in China may be seen as a space of enhanced individual
autonomy and place-making by China’s new middle classes in a country that is heavily
influenced by the presence of an authoritarian state (Pow, 2007). Such a view is in contrast
with the views of Zhang and Ong (2009) or Tomba (2014) who attends more to the reflection
of governing technologies of the Chinese Party-state in Chinese neighbourhoods.
The intense land use and the drive to maximise returns on investment in Asian metropolises
produce vertical forms of urban development or ‘vertical accumulation’ (Shin, 2011) or what
Scott (2011) coins as ‘aestheticized land use intensification’. As a result, high-density
residential and commercial mega-projects as well as iconic skyscrapers characterise the
cityscapes of major metropolises in Asia (Hou, 2012). Such vertical urbanism is merged with
‘processes of speculative urbanism, although undoubtedly set to take different forms from
those in South Asia and in Bangalore, are beginning to make an appearance on the African
continent’ (Watson 2014: 216). One of the extreme examples of speculative urbanism at
display would be the emergence of ‘ghost cities’ in China, referring to newly constructed
cities that remain hugely under-populated or near empty despite completion (Woodworth,
2012). According to Sorace and Hurst (2016, p.305), such ghost cities are the manifestation of
‘phantom urbanisation’, arguing that ‘China’s urbanisation of land and creation of
infrastructure far outpace the urbanisation of its people’.
While the rise of Asian cities as reference points owes largely to their economic success,
much less known about them is what lies in the shadow of their success. To accelerate the
process of urban development, the state endeavours to carry out, albeit with variegated
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outcomes of success and failure, dispossession of people's rights to advance capital
accumulation, spatial restructuring, and population sorting (Glassman, 2006; Levien, 2011):
Asian economies stand out in this respect due to their condensation of development
experiences, facilitating the displacement of existing land users as part of pursuing creative
destruction to assemble lands and provide a tabula rasa condition for development (c.f.,
Kennedy and Sood, 2016). One of the enduring results is mega-displacement (Lees, Shin and
López-Morales, 2016, pp.171-200). The state intervenes to remove developmental constraints
such as fragmented property rights and address the ‘tragedy of anti-commons’, accompanied
by the mobilisation of state resources and power to enforce such state actions. Various
planning measures such as compulsory purchase and land enclosure take place, resulting in,
often forceful, displacement of existing land users. Brutal use of force by the state (Kim,
1999; Shao, 2013) or the use of ‘relational repression’ (O’Brien and Deng, 2017) is not
uncommon to facilitate displacement.
Squatter and dilapidated settlements have often been subject to demolition to make room for
public infrastructure in central areas or to remove them from the gaze of elites and for the
purpose of making cities presentable to the world. In South Korea, for instance, during the
1960s and 1970s the state pursued large-scale clearance of squatter settlers in Seoul under the
name of rationalising land use and civic beautification, and in the 1980s for the hosting of the
1988 Summer Olympic Games (Kim, 1999; KOCER, 1998). Many displacees were evicted
overnight, sent to urban peripheries, and allocated public lands for building informal
dwellings, producing endogenous forms of gentrification (Shin and Kim, 2016; Lees, Shin
and López-Morales, 2016).
China is another notable example of the state-led urbanisation that accompanies mega-
displacement, as the Party-state actively pursue urbanisation as a state project to reorganise
space and society (Shin and Zhao, 2018). The result is the uprooted livelihood of millions of
urban households and former rural villagers, who were displaced from their homes and
neighbourhoods (Hsing, 2010; Lin et al., 2015; Shin, 2014). In this regard, China sees
dispossession and gentrification as a state project (Shin, 2016) or ‘a mode of urbanization’
(Tomba, 2017). Under this condition, state violence to facilitate eviction and displacement in
China is more clearly pronounced especially as land-based accumulation and urban
redevelopment have become important sources of revenue generation for local governments
and a means to realise the visions of the state in their pursuit for modernity and world city-
making (Wu and Zhang, 2007). Consequently, urban land assembly, and by extension the
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demolition of buildings and displacement of land users, has become an important function of
local governments. More recently, this process of city-making accompanying dispossession of
citizens and villagers is replicated in India where the neoliberal turn of urban governance
pushes for a combination of technological and infrastructural fixes that result in nation-wide
plans for world-class city-making and smart urbanism (Das, 2015; Datta and Shaban, 2017).
While the production of tabula rasa conditions of development or creative destruction
accompanied by mega-displacement would partly characterise the Asian urbanism, it is also
necessary to acknowledge that the process of eviction and state-led gentrification has been
more complex and nuanced than it may appear. Local residents are heterogenous in terms of
their tenure, race, citizenship and so on, and the effect of eviction and relocation has also been
differentially affecting local residents (Doshi, 2013). The imposition of speculative urbanism
also creates a window of opportunities for the state to co-opt those factions of local residents
and wider citizens to support the state project of re-writing the urban landscape (Shin and
Kim, 2016). The hegemony of the ruling class gets imposed on the subordinate classes,
producing false consciousness as Antonio Gramsci puts it - this indicates that there is a
potential for the subordinate classes to share the urban imaginaries and aspirations of the
ruling class (Shin, 2018).
Coda: Asian Urbanisms
Is there a version of urbanism that can be referred to as distinctively Asian? Singapore as city-
state has been a front-runner in providing the source of ‘aspirational urbanism’, but
‘Singaporean urbanism’ cannot be seen as static, as it is constantly in the making across time
and space that extends beyond the nation scale. If we shift our attention to economies of a
larger geographical scale such as China or India, it would be even more arduous to define a
‘national’ version of urbanism. While Chinese urbanism can be broadly scrutinised at national
scale, this construct would soon be eroded as soon as observers zoom in to gaze at provincial
and municipal scales of analysis: Beijing turns out to present different urban stories from
those of Shanghai or Guangzhou, and more so from those of smaller regional cities despite
their endeavour to emulate China’s ‘eastern urbanism’ (c.f., Gaubatz, 2008). Indian cities also
depict variations in their experiences of coping with urban challenges (see Shatkin, 2014).
Nevertheless, discussing urbanism with an ‘Asian’ prefix may fall in the trap of ‘Asian
exceptionalism,’ which overly emphasises the local contingencies to the extent that theories
thus developed cannot be applied elsewhere. This is an argument that is familiar to sinologists
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who often confront ‘China exceptionalism’ (cf. Pow, 2012). To avoid such a trap, I refer to
the prudent perspective of Doreen Massey (1999, p.281) who argued for ‘[a] spatial (rather
than a temporal) recognition of difference’, calling for the need of ‘acknowledg[ing] that “the
South” might not just be following us [the North] but might have its own story to tell’ and
‘grant[ing] the possibility of at least relatively autonomous trajectories’. This is in line with
the viewpoint of comparative urban studies (Robinson, 2005; Lees, Shin and López-Morales,
2016), which advocates the placing of all cities on level-playing fields without privileging the
experience of, in particular, world cities from the Global North.
Therefore, Asian urbanism is not to be seen as an exception, but as part of ‘a multiplicity of
narratives’ (Massey, 1999, p.281) that make up the global urban history. At the same time, we
are to bear in mind that lumping the divergent experiences of the urban into a singular Asian
urbanism risks the danger of homogenising the vast terrain of heterogeneous urban stories
into a singular narrative. This calls for the need of seeng Asian urbanism in plural terms such
as ‘Asian urbanisms’ (Hogan et al., 2012) or ‘urban Asias’ (Bunnell and Goh, 2017). Such
pluralistic perspectives would further allow us, as Massey ascertains (1999), to critically think
of the multiple, locally attuned possibilities of emancipation and progressive urban futures
across Asia.
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SEE ALSO [cross references]
Chinese Urbanism (EURS0042); Cities in Developing Countries (EURS0043); East Asian
Urbanization (EURS0084); Southeast Asia (EURS0303); Southwest China (EURS0304);
Speculative Urbanism (EURS0317)
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Lees, L., Shin, H.B. and López-Morales, E. (2016) Planetary Gentrification. Cambridge:
Polity Press
Roy, A. and Ong, A. (eds.) (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being
Global. London: Blackwell
Shin, H.B. (2018) Urban movements and the genealogy of urban rights discourses: The case
of urban Protesters against redevelopment and displacement in Seoul, South Korea. Annals of
the American Association of Geographers 108(2): 356-369
Author Mini Biography:
HYUN BANG SHIN is Associate Professor of Geogra- phy and Urban Studies at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail:
[email protected]. He is also Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South
Page 19 of 19
Korea. He is the co-author of Planetary Gentrification (2016, Polity Press) and the co-editor
of Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (2015, Policy Press). His
research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of urbanisation,
the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city,
and mega-events as urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities.